The election of a new head of the International Chess Federation (FIDE) has sparked a political scandal in Ukraine. Ukraine’s national chess federation criticized the choice of Timur Turlov, a Kazakhstani businessman who lived and did business in Russia for many years. But Turlov received unexpected support from Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of President Zelensky’s office. A week later, Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office withdrew its lawsuit seeking to seize Turlov’s income for the Russian state. Writing for Meduza, Ukrainian journalist Konstantin Skorkin explains everything that is known about FIDE’s leadership changes and the events that followed.
How the FIDE presidential election unfolded
Many international sports federations readily recruit influential businesspeople and politicians to lead them, using their connections to secure support and funding for their sports. For example, Sebastian Coe, a former member of Britain’s House of Lords, heads the International Association of Athletics Federations; Swedish billionaire Johan Eliasch leads the International Ski and Snowboard Federation; and French politician David Lappartient heads the International Cycling Union.
For the past two decades, FIDE has been led by Russians. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russians’ presence in international sports has often been seen as legitimizing the aggressor state. Some members of Russia’s elite have left international sports federations because of sanctions. Billionaire Vladimir Lisin, for example, no longer heads the International Shooting Sport Federation.
Others have held on to their positions. Alisher Usmanov, who had headed the International Fencing Federation since 2008, temporarily stepped aside in 2022 to keep the personal sanctions imposed on him from affecting the federation’s work. Just two years later, however, Usmanov won reelection.
The chess world has been home to a particularly large number of influential Russians. From 1995 to 2018, FIDE was headed by Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who was president of the republic of Kalmykia when he was elected. Ilyumzhinov sought to make Elista, which hosted international chess tournaments, a global center for chess. In the late 1990s, a complex called City Chess was even built near the city.
In 2018, FIDE’s leadership called on Ilyumzhinov to resign: He had been placed under U.S. sanctions, which were hurting the federation’s work. Ilyumzhinov refused to leave voluntarily, however, and FIDE’s ethics commission had to remove him.
His successor was another Russian politician, former Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, who had served in the leadership of the Russian Chess Federation. By the time he was elected head of FIDE, he was already chairman of the supervisory board of the Russian Agricultural Bank.
Dvorkovich is the son of the well-known chess coach Vladimir Dvorkovich, who was part of the coaching team that trained world chess champions Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov.
The younger Dvorkovich led the world chess federation until July, when, like his predecessor, he was placed on a sanctions list — in his case, the EU’s, for “publicly supporting the actions of the Russian Federation” — and was forced to step away from FIDE’s leadership.
Earlier that year, in February, Ukraine had sanctioned the former deputy prime minister for supporting “Russian aggression,” along with nine Russian athletes.
The Ukrainian president’s website says the sanctions list was drawn up in response to a petition by Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych. During the 2026 Winter Olympics, Heraskevych was disqualified for wearing a helmet bearing portraits of Ukrainian athletes killed during the war. Dvorkovich’s name, however, did not appear in Heraskevych’s petition, which was published on the Ukrainian government’s website.
The former FIDE head currently holds no government or political posts. Since leaving the chess federation, he has been working as a professor at the New Economic School in Russia. It recently emerged that Dvorkovich plans to challenge the European sanctions in an EU court.
Russia’s FIDE membership was suspended in June because the Chess Federation of Russia had established branches in occupied Ukrainian territory: the Donbas and the annexed parts of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.
The election for a new FIDE president took place in September in Samarkand. Ilyumzhinov tried to run again but did not even make the official list of candidates.
Three candidates made the list:
- Vadim Rosenstein: A German businessman and founder of the WR Chess team, born in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, who holds Russian and German citizenship
- Jan Henric Buettner: A German businessman who invests heavily in chess championships
- Timur Turlov: A Kazakhstani businessman of Russian origin who has headed Kazakhstan’s chess federation since 2023
Delegates from FIDE’s national member federations elect its president. Delegates from 196 of the 202 countries eligible to vote officially registered for the election in Samarkand and received ballots.
Turlov and Rosenstein received the most votes in the first round. In the second round, Turlov won 110 votes to Rosenstein’s 85, with one FIDE delegate abstaining.
Who is Timur Turlov?
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Timur Turlov was among the Russian businesspeople who tried to distance themselves from Russia.
Born in Moscow, he graduated from the Tsiolkovsky Russian State Technological University (MATI) and began his business career as a trader for Moscow companies operating on the U.S. stock market. In 2008, Turlov founded Freedom Finance, which gave clients access to U.S. stock market infrastructure, including initial public offerings.
In 2012, he opened a subsidiary in Kazakhstan and began doing business there. In 2015, he established Freedom Holding Corp., registered in Nevada. It brought together the Russian and Kazakhstani Freedom Finance companies, the Freedom24 app, and Freedom Finance Bank. Turlov became the main shareholder. Freedom Finance Kazakhstan Bank joined the holding company in 2020, followed in 2021 by Freedom Finance Insurance, a group of Kazakhstani insurance companies.
In October 2019, Turlov listed Freedom Holding Corp. on Nasdaq. It became the first financial institution from the Commonwealth of Independent States to be listed on the exchange.
In January 2021, Turlov’s holding company acquired Prime Executions Inc., a U.S. broker-dealer registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This gave the holding company’s clients direct access to the U.S. market. That same year, Turlov entered the Forbes global billionaires list in 1,517th place, with a fortune of $2.1 billion.
In June 2022, Turlov obtained Kazakhstani citizenship. To do so, he had to give up his Russian passport and the “offshore” passport he had previously obtained from St. Kitts and Nevis. At the same time, he announced that he was ending his business ties with Russia. By October 2022, the company’s Russian operations had been transferred to co-founder and Deputy CEO Maxim Povalishin. The deal was worth $140 million; the company soon rebranded as Tsifra.
According to Forbes Kazakhstan, Turlov ranks second among the country’s richest people and sixth among its most influential. In December 2025, he expanded his influence by acquiring the Kazakhstani telecommunications operator Transtelecom. Around the same time, his holding company began publishing a local edition of the glossy magazine Tatler.
After 2022, Turlov became involved in charitable projects in Kazakhstan. In spring 2023, he founded Kazakhstan’s QJ League for youth soccer and became chairman of its board of trustees. Late that year, Turlov launched Qalam, an online publication “devoted to the history and culture of the world as seen from Kazakhstan and Central Asia.”
His company spent a total of $66 million on charity in 2023, its representatives said.
Severing his business ties with Russia, however, did not help Turlov avoid sanctions. In October 2022, Ukraine placed him and his holding company’s Ukrainian subsidiary on its sanctions list alongside other figures in Russian or Russia-linked businesses. More than 2,500 individuals and 1,300 companies were sanctioned at the time. Others listed alongside Turlov included businessmen Mikhail Fridman, Oleg Deripaska, and Alexey Mordashov; pro-Russian Ukrainian politician Viktor Medvedchuk; and members of Alexander Lukashenko’s circle.
Turlov called his inclusion on the sanctions list “a clerical error.” The company promised to challenge it, though it took no concrete steps to do so. In 2023, Hindenburg Research investigated Freedom Holding Corp. and accused it of evading sanctions. The holding company’s shares fell 8% as a result. The investigation also drew the attention of the SEC, which launched its own inquiry. In January 2024, Freedom Holding Corp. commissioned an independent review that refuted Hindenburg’s findings.
Turlov has been involved in chess since January 2023, when he became head of Kazakhstan’s federation. He told journalists that he regularly plays as an amateur on Chess.com. “I try to enjoy the game itself,” Turlov said. “I’m not out to prove anything to anyone in chess.”
Why Ukraine’s federation opposed Turlov’s election as FIDE president — and where Mykhailo Podolyak comes in
The news outlet Agentstvo, citing an acquaintance of Turlov’s, reported that he has close ties to Kazakhstani President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and “does nothing without his approval.” In July, the outlet reported, Kazakhstan’s president met with Vladimir Putin and asked him to help Turlov win the FIDE election. Another source told Agentstvo that Putin agreed. After Turlov won the FIDE presidential election, Tokayev personally congratulated him.
Turlov’s victory sparked another scandal. The Ukrainian Chess Federation issued a statement saying it did not support his candidacy. It had initially nominated its own candidate, federation head Oleksandr Kamyshin, an outside adviser to Ukraine’s president and a former minister for strategic industries. Kamyshin, however, declined to run, saying his “priority during the war is developing chess in Ukraine.”
The FIDE presidential election uses a secret ballot, and it is not known whom the Ukrainian delegate voted for. Champion, Ukrainska Pravda’s sports website, reported that Ukraine’s federation most likely supported Buettner, who failed to reach the second round, because Ukrainian media also suspected Turlov’s main rival, Rosenstein, of doing business with Russia.
According to the news outlet UNIAN, revenue at 2R Integra, a company linked to Rosenstein’s family, grew roughly 40-fold after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and its website advertised services for supplying industrial equipment and electronics to Russia in circumvention of sanctions.
After Turlov’s victory, he received unexpected support from Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of the Ukrainian president’s office. At the new FIDE president’s invitation, Podolyak became a vice president. Indian grandmaster and former world champion Viswanathan Anand became first vice president.
The alliance between Turlov and Podolyak came as a surprise for several reasons.
First, there had been no previous public reports of contact between the Kazakhstani businessman and the Ukrainian adviser. They also had no business ties or known history of political cooperation.
Second, Podolyak had no connection to the chess world and had never expressed an interest in the game. Discussing his new post in interviews, he gave an exclusively political rationale: He wanted to use the vice presidency to reduce Russian influence in the chess world while leaving sporting matters to the Ukrainian Chess Federation.
Yet it was with the Ukrainian Chess Federation that his relationship soured. Turlov arranged the appointment without involving the national federation, which sharply condemned Podolyak’s decision. The federation said it had received no offer to nominate a Ukrainian representative to the new FIDE head’s team, and its regional organizations sent a letter of protest to President Zelensky. The letter said:
By working with sanctioned individuals [Turlov — Meduza], Mykhailo Podolyak is legitimizing Russians’ presence in FIDE’s leadership and helping Russia maintain its influence over international chess. This undoes the efforts of Ukrainian chess players who have spent years fighting that influence.
Podolyak, in turn, criticized the Ukrainian Chess Federation for its “passive stance.” In his view, its officials had not done enough to counter Russian influence within FIDE. “They weren’t involved at all in getting rid of Dvorkovich’s team. They did absolutely nothing. Not publicly, not behind the scenes,” Podolyak said.
Ukrainian Chess Federation Vice President Volodymyr Kovalchuk maintains that Turlov is part of Dvorkovich’s team and simply “swapped in” for the sanctioned Russian. In Kovalchuk’s view, Podolyak helped legitimize this “castling” maneuver. Kovalchuk believes that “nothing will change” under Turlov:
Only the name has changed — Turlov will replace Dvorkovich. But I’m sure Dvorkovich will keep handling all of FIDE’s affairs. The entire Russian team is still there, and Dvorkovich will be the one actually running things, while Turlov will keep running his business. After all, he’s a Russian oligarch who made his money in Russia and is now investing it in Kazakhstan.
One detail supporting Kovalchuk’s prediction is the appointment of former Russian Sports Minister Alexander Kolobov as second vice president.
Podolyak continued to defend Turlov, calling Ukraine’s sanctions against the businessman “strange.” “When the full-scale invasion began, he became a Kazakhstani citizen and left Russia — which, unfortunately, still exists — behind for good. He also invested in humanitarian programs in Ukraine for a long time,” Podolyak said on Instagram.
Citing sources, Kommersant reported that Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office moved in early October to have Turlov declared an “extremist” and his Russian assets confiscated over that humanitarian support. Law enforcement officials cited Freedom Holding’s transfer of 2 million euros for humanitarian aid to Ukraine. The money was intended to buy ambulances. A representative for Turlov said the businessman no longer had any assets in Russia.
In mid-October, it emerged that the Prosecutor General’s Office had withdrawn its lawsuit and the court had dismissed the case against Turlov. A representative of the prosecutor’s office did not give a reason for the decision.
In Ukraine, sanctions against Turlov’s company have begun to ease. In January 2025, Zelensky issued a decree allowing Ukrainian clients of Turlov’s brokerage to recover their assets. Their accounts had been frozen when sanctions were imposed three years earlier on the company, through which Ukrainians invested in government bonds and other securities.
For now, however, lifting the sanctions entirely is not on the table. Although the restrictions against Turlov were imposed for five years and expire in late 2027, his holding company acknowledges in its annual report that there is no guarantee he will be removed from the sanctions list.
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Konstantin Skorkin